Archive of Our Own ^beta

Enter Sunny. Window-scaler, fifteen, an ascended vatkid, but the hand-painted sunflower insignia of his old vatkid gang refuses to be corroded off his acidbreaker jacket. The harness pulling lightly on his hollow chest, the tether only another vertical line in this city of barcodes. One hand on a steel beam running below the sky jetties of the thermoregulation floor. Feet skidding on a thousand feet of air.

He flicks a clip on his harness and drops down a hundred feet past the levels of the Sunbright Chemicals Building he knows are unsafe, the ones with wall-length windows and sprawling cafeterias. They’ll think he’s a body. Those aren’t uncommon, since there’s guys on the roof firing down. One of the guys is his, though.

“Kel,” he says.

Static falling like rain. No gunshots yet.

“Kel,” he says. “I’m reading 883 above sea. Thermo-reg floor number 5.”

A rough, warm voice in his ear. “Sorry. H asked me to take some photos next time I was on the Sunbright roof. Should’ve gotten acidproof film, though, heh.”

“You’ll have the money for a new roll after this job. If we don’t miss our window.”

“Right, yeah,” he says. “Uh… you’re in position to drop, yes. The entry room is on Floor 65, five floors down, not more than twenty or so feet to your left. But go too far and you’ll roll into a conference hall, not a closet.”

“Roger.”

Sunny drops the remaining distance and scrambles along the piping running in a fissure above his target floor. He stays flat, chest pressed to the ledge, praying half-heartedly the workers milling above wouldn’t spot the small curve of his upper back edging along the bottom border of the window.

Once in position, he smears a tube of fluoric acid into the edges of the window. “I’ve pasted it.” He climbs back up to the thermoregulation floor, hooks his tether to the outermost rod lining the underbelly of the panel jetty, and waits.

These placid moments of wallsliding and gazing out into the hot grey mist that rises from between towers are only temporary. He thinks about falling into them sometimes. He thinks about becoming fog as he falls, molecule by molecule, dissolving, so that only the dust that rides on his coat would shower upon the burning concrete understory.

Kel chimes in. “It’s ready. Switch links to H once you’re inside. I gotta focus.”

“Mhm.”

A final look at the dusk outside. On the facade of the Vandalus Chemicals building, across the steaming gap, a bright pink star flashes in the dark. He blinks. “There’s a slider on the Vandalus tower.”

“Corporate?”

“No, one of us. Corps don’t have pink hair. 60th floor. I’d tell you more, but the fog is too thick.”

“I dunno her. You can ask H, but I don’t think there’s a point. Lotsa kids sliding now. It’s too lucrative to be ours only, ‘n honestly ? More kids sliding means less working the vats.”

“Yeah. Let’s get this over with.” He inhales, double-checks his tether readings and calculations, poises his finger over the tether clip.

Then he pushes off from the jetty and falls. His feet punch through the glass like a battering ram. It launches from the frame and clatters to the ground. As the tether catches on the windowframe, he unclips, letting his body rocket into the supply closet.

He rolls, dust gathering in his mouth, arms around his face, until his back hits a row of filing cabinets, knocking the dust back out of his mouth.

A few moments of heartbeat. He exhales slowly. Four walls around him once more, and the floor sizzling where drops of sulfuric acid land in through the now gaping window. The corners of his bony frame—his hips, his knees, his shoulders—throb red, threatening bruising even through the protective padding.

“Success,” he whispers.

“Awesome,” Kel says, the excitement barely hidden in his voice. “We’ll be rollin’ in the big bucks before you know it.”

Sunny clambers up, brushing dust off his knees, and flips a slide-switch behind his ear.

Enter Hero. Ex-vatkid, nineteen. Charming, slippery bastard, he’s been described. Charms his way past the defensive AIs guarding the company towers, with the help of a little injectable program once in a while to grease the cogs. A sunflower lanyard deep in his bedside drawer, holding an old photograph in its plastic envelope.

Few weeks ago, Hero—or H, as his boys call him—had a date in the upper residential sector. Not a rarity for him, as he doesn’t look vatkid, with his hair clean and soft and an easy cologne-spritzed air about him. But he’s still a denizen of the undergrowth, and you’d know it if you’re part of the undergrowth, because he wears gloves to hide the burns like the rest of them. The pampered boys in the tower apartments think it’s the coolest, most debonair shit ever. The gloves, yeah, but the pain written in lines around his eyes moreso.

This date was different, though. Silas—some director’s son. Likes Negronis and talking about the great toothy beasts in the menagerie he has shares in, in some tower far away. Beautiful hands. He’d led Hero out of the nightclub, up the escalator, onto a shopping floor. Lightless murk in the windows, so when he’d gazed outward, reflections of the “Closed” signs paraded infinitely outward and inward.

Silas sat him down in front of a bakery and dug a silver chip out from the roof of his mouth. “We’ve got a job for you, vat boy. Sunbright.”

Hero quit pretending to be buzzed and leaned forward, letting the light come back into his eyes. Slightly annoyed it was probably the only job the night was going to ask of him. “Don’t call me that if you’re only here to talk business. We’re not accepting any more jobs until the fiscal quarter ends.”

“Yes, your boys told us that.” Silas held the chip up. “Here’s the dossier and data on their AI. And fifty thou.”

“Fif—Th—that’s, uh.” Hero tried to keep the shock from showing on his face. Wasn’t a good idea to get excited in case Silas was high-balling him. “That’s generous, but… I can’t. It's for the boys’ safety. End of quarter’s a feeding frenzy and—”

“There’s more. This job is about you. We know where her body is.”

“You…” A cold sweat blossomed down his neck. He kept his voice even. “Who do you work for?”

Silas smiled and flipped the silver card over. Curved lines swirled around each other, etched in an empty, smooth corner of the chip’s matrix. A stem and a leaf: a minimalistic hieroglyph of a sunflower.

“You want me to steal from your own company?”

The hole in the supply closet wall that used to hold a pane of glass is invaded yet again, first by a sorry excuse of a grappling hook—whose only defense against corrosion is a thick skin of duct tape. Next by a small hand marred by peeling burn scars. The girl it belongs to flips effortlessly into the space, landing agile and silent on her bare feet. No shoes necessary. The white ribbons of skin on the soles of her feet are tough and numb.

She follows the trail that cleaves through the dust on the floor, where a body was mopped through the dark until it hit a row of now—dented filing cabinets. Finger-swipes in the dust on a nearby stack of dead computers. It dragged itself up. Sizzling, wet bootprints tracking out through the doorway.

She inhales through her teeth and wipes the handprint in the dust away. He’s been fucking sloppy lately.

Enter Aubrey. Ex-vatkid, in the real way. Works for Vandalus now. The sunflower barcode that was on her wrist now eaten away by acid, along with the outer three layers of her skin. End-of-quarter espionage bloodbaths are her hunting ground. Sixteen.

She’s not supposed to leave the Vandalus tower, but she’s sterilized its floors of intruders from Sunbright, from Bryson Pharmaceuticals, from JPAK, et cetera. She’s free to spend her night how she likes.

Her roof girl buzzes in her ear. “Christ, are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“Yeah, yeah. Our shift is over. Go home, Kim, you fucking workaholic.”

Kim mutters a rapid-fire string of obscenities but shuts up after that, thank God.

Aubrey follows the trail of sulfuric corrosion up disused staircases and down service elevator shafts, pausing her stalk only to bash her baton into the head of an unsuspecting technician on a lab floor and take his coat and his wrist ID implant. But it’s not necessary. H has sweet-talked the security AI into opening doors for Sunny, but he hasn’t figured out how to close them for other sliders.

She crouches behind a bronzed pot of plastic foliage and watches a slider hurtle past the wall-length window. A few seconds later, the severed end of their tether whips past as well. For a moment, she wonders about Kel and how he’s faring defending Sunny’s anchor in the warzone that is the skyscraper canopy.

But then she reminds herself she doesn’t particularly care.

Not a bad route that Sunny’s following, honestly . No dead personnel, which is what rookie sliders get wrong most of the time. Some dead vatkids, rival sliders, hidden behind desks and tossed into emergency stairwells. Tidy, careful work. His sister would be proud—if she hadn’t decided to cut her own tether and become a wet splat on the ground.

That incident made H neurotically cautious. From the way Sunny’s path winds—redundant and arduous but essentially invisible—she can tell he’s still like that. He wouldn’t send his boys into the end-of-quarter bloodbath for nothing. So why is Sunny here?

Not a good time to ponder it. She’s under a desk holding a handgun to a terrified clerk’s chin and her own breath to the bottom of her lungs as the heavy boots of armed guards stomp past. She counts to five and breathes again, rational thought returning to her head, and she slams the butt of the gun into the clerk’s temple. Not hard enough. He tackles her and her head smashes into the leg of the desk. White feathers beat across her vision.

Between the feathers, his fist rears back for a punch. Her baton telescopes in her hand and she thrusts it at his eye, then digs down, driving him back into the floor. The meat of his face pops and squelches. She grabs his hair and pushes his teeth into the seat of an office chair to muffle his scream.

Blood pooling, world hanging tilted from a single corner from a single nail. She sits up and throws up and rises on unsteady feet. Wipes her crimson hands and feet on his shirt. Wrings the blood and vomit out of her hair. Bootsteps approaching in the distance. Was that too lou—

A wall away, a room away, a chaincutter buzzes, the expensive kind corporate sliders use because they don’t know how to get through windows without breaking them. The guards rush past her cubicle and gather around the window in the next room. Aubrey winces. A smattering of machine gun fire, like rain hitting pavement, and they’re dead before they can unclip from their tether.

The tower’s an adder’s nest. He must be after something priceless.

Nausea swells inside her and she throws up again before ducking out of the desk and back onto the trail to Sunny. She’ll pin the dead clerk on him.

“I’m at the elevators. Just wanted to say: I’m not happy about this.”

“I know,” Hero says flatly from the chip in Sunny’s ear.

“You shouldn’t have accepted this job."

“I know. But you’re fine, aren’t you? Kel too. He’s winking at the roof cams right now. Look, I’m not—I’m not careless. I did more prep for this job than any we’ve ever done. We’re as good as ghosts as far as Sunbright’s concerned.”

“Hm. Not Sunbright. I’ve had to deal with about six other sliders. That's more than usual.”

A silence. “I’m sorry. ABBI can’t tell the difference between you and other vatkids. If I make her fire on them, she’ll fire on you too.”

Sunny’s since left the office and laboratory sectors. In front of him, a vast cylindrical hole ringed with beams and elevator cables stands imposing, eternal, monolithic. This mass of service elevators innervates the tower from top to bottom. The elevator in front of him is scheduled to arrive any moment now, called by Hero through ABBI. With Sunny in its carriage, it’ll shoot like an arrow straight down into the underground cold storage sectors.

His neck is slick with sweat, the hairs on the back of it matting uncomfortably to his skin. His acidbreaker jacket traps all moisture within him. He feels swollen with blood and about to burst, like a tick. The elevator ride down will bring him a moment of solace so that he can wipe his hands through his hair until they stop trembling.

A clatter sounds from the wall behind him, and he whips around. A flick of his wrist. His knife’s in his hand. The ventilation grill above the doorway buckles under the impact of a kick. A leg shrouded in burn scars and blood emerges from it, then another, then the slider drops deftly onto the floor. Her red-soaked pink hair hangs in front of her face. She reaches to flip it up.

Sunny wastes no time diving at her neck with his knife. She rolls her shoulder in to dodge the blow. The knife catches her collarbone and lacerates all fabric, tissue, tendon in the way.

She grunts and steps back, one hand clutching the wound and the other raised in surrender, dropping the baton clutched within it to the floor. “Sunny, it’s me. It’s me. It’s Aubrey. I don’t wanna fight.”

And from above, the elevator he’s been waiting for slams down like a hammer, blowing the slider’s hair out of her face. Ocular prostheses that glow green-blue in the dark, under a drape of neon hair too bright to be organic. Wild brushstrokes of scarring on her face that pull her upper lip up into an eternal sneer. The same look of earnestness, of dignity, despite the blood splattered like freckles on her cheek.

“Aubrey,” he mouths.

“Hell,” Hero says. “Ask her what happened to her.”

The elevator pings and lifts its chainlink doors up for them, its innards illuminated warmly by a single orange halogen lamp. ABBI’s young, otherworldly voice echoes through the hollow. “Here you are.”

Aubrey digs a rudimentary first aid kit out from her jacket pocket and slaps it into Sunny’s palm as she strides into the elevator. “You’ll have to check it out. I can’t see the wound.”

Sunny stares, struggling to overlay the two stills of Aubrey in his mind, one the bright-eyed ruddy brunette he’d learned to slide with years ago. The other…

“Come on, what? I fell into a vat.”

He shrugs, unzipping the first aid kit as he follows her into the elevator.

The floor drops under them. They plummet like bodies into the earth, hair lifting from the backs of their necks. Aubrey closes her eyes and it’s like she’s falling into the steaming vat again. No impact, no sudden deceleration awaiting her. The acid will take her apart and she will be disassembled. Is this how Mari felt?

“The bone isn’t damaged.”

She opens her eyes to a strobing world, soft light from the doorways of level after level blazing past, cometlike. Sunny’s soft fingers on her clavicle pressing gauze into her skin. “You might not need sutures. The scar tissue doesn’t bleed much.”

“Brilliant, don’t bother.” She knocks his hand away and compresses the wound herself.

He sits back against the cage and closes his eyes, letting the chain links cradle his head. He looks not a day older than when she last saw him four years ago, she thinks. A bit skinnier, maybe. New scars on the exposed forearms he props up on his knees. “You’re staring at me like you’re planning to off me,” he says.

She laughs. It hurts her ribs. “I’m off the clock. Just wanted to see what you twerps were up to.”

“You won’t get a cut.”

“That’s alright. Don’t need one.”

Sunny raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Sunny licks his lips. “You’re a good slider. Nothing stopping you from sliding out.”

“Nothing else out there.” She shakes her head. “I’ll always be someone’s dog. At least here I got some friends, corporate legitimacy, a place I can come home to every morning. Medical care. But still—I… I don’t know. I don’t blame your sister for wanting to escape.”

The elevator cables reverberate like piano strings, too low for them to hear. Aubrey thinks about severing them. Would it feel any different?

“Don’t say that,” Sunny says, an odd light in his eye. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Enter Mari.

Sixteen, beloved, the first slider there ever was, the best as well. She sewed sunflower patches into their pants out of a ball of wet yellow twine they found in the cracks in the pavement, fallen like manna from heaven—miraculously whole in the sulfuric torrents. She fished the needle out of a gutter drain with the twine tied around a piece of a Sunbright marketing magnet.

The smog was light that day, one of those rare days she could see the tops of the glass giants that sandwiched the streets of the understory. She held the bundle of string up, let it sit on the Sunbright rooftop in her mind. The needle dangled down by the windows as if to pierce them. An idea dropped wetly upon her head.

From then on, it spread, oozing out from her like honey into Sunny, then Hero, then Kel, then Aubrey. It wasn’t just sliding. It was a dream of clean air, linen sheets, long-sleeved shirts, music implants. Tower life.

It was a dream they’d achieved after only four sliding jobs for Sunbright, but they couldn’t stop. Sunbright didn’t let them. They stayed in company apartments, were paid company money, lived company lives. Their memories dwindled between the five of them, so they charged Basil to remember. Their joints began to click and ache, their ears ring. Daytime hauntings.

Each job, they were swallowed by the towers, digested a bit, then vomited back up; each job hoping a little that the towers would crush their delicate necks in their jaws instead. Sliding would kill them slowly if it did not kill them fast.

So Mari said fuck it. Enough sliding things out. Let’s slide shit in.

Level B74. Cold Storage Sector, a giant cryonic atrium housing a labyrinth of shelves of frozen specimens. That’s where Sunny leads her. Spheres frosted over in rows, columns, a vast array of interrupted time glowing blue like the skies of old. Here, the organic ceases to be. She shivers. Her implants grow cold and bite into her skin.

Sunny whispers to H, and somewhere, a canister slides from the storage frame with a mechanical whoosh. They take off to the sound, ducking away from storage supervisors and technicians. They run into a guard—Aubrey dismantles him in a quiet but violent struggle. She spends the rest of the walk trying to pry out a shard of sternum that had embedded in a patch of her baton weakened by corrosion. Sunny walks a little farther from her after that.

The canister is small, containing a human head shrouded in dark hair. Aubrey wipes the frost from the blue glass. The face that stares back at her is peaceful and familiar. Reeling backwards, she stays upright only through Sunny’s grip on her jacket shoulder.

“That’s Mari.” She gasps, shudders, blinks. “That’s—But that’s impossible.” She shakes her head, clearing the fog around her bruised memories. “She—she fell a thousand feet. She should have turned into paste. H, what the fuck is this?”

Sunny is stone, expressionless. “He’s as surprised as you are.” He pulls a satchel from his pants pocket and begins shoving the orb inside.

“Hey.” Aubrey grabs his forearm hard enough to bruise. Rage blazes through her as she twists it downwards, only the vague memory of once being very fond of him stopping herself from tearing the bone clean from the joint. “What about you?”

He grits his teeth and looks away.

Enter Basil. Vatkid. Ex-slider. Sixteen. Killed one man in his life when he was ten and was unresponsive for a week after. Wouldn’t slide with them again. Said it made him sick.

They let him stay with them anyway because they loved him like nothing else.

He still has tremors from that kill. Still sometimes sees his victim’s face instead of his own in his little hand mirror, the one with one corner sharpened to a bleeding point. He keeps it in a tin under his cot, along with clean cloth and black thread. Mari’s needle and magnet. Her golden yarn.

Sunflowers scarred into his thighs. Hope stuffed into his heart right next to six souls, including his.

Aubrey’s eyes narrow, irises burning as bright and artificial as the coolant shuttled through the freezer pipes. “What happened to her?” Her breath comes out as shaky bursts of vapor. “Say something, Sunny.”

Even though she doesn’t cry, he can’t bear to look at her because he knows there would be tears trailing down her ruined face. If only her tear ducts hadn’t cauterized to shriveled little wastes. Her resolve breaks. She lets his arm go and spits to the side.

In Sunny’s ear, H echoes Aubrey’s questions. Following silence, he snarls everything from profanity to death threats to pleas for absolution. It makes it hard to think. “H, I’m muting you.”

“Go ahead. Good luck getting ABBI to take you back up,” H barks. “How do you expect to tether d—” Sunny flicks a switch behind his ear.

“You remember the vat floors,” he says to Aubrey. All the better. His legs would give out if he had to crawl all the way back up to the supply closet.

“What do you want?”

“You know where the vatkid tunnels are. Find me a way out and I’ll tell you everything.”

She stares. “Whatever. Deal.”

Thanks to Hero’s meddling, it’s easy to convince ABBI that the two of them are lost vatkids trying to find their way back to the vat floor, where paths unmarked on the official Sunbright maps lead aboveground. Trade routes, escape routes, routes for stargazing and sunseeking. ABBI calls the elevator for them, and Aubrey’s mind swirls with confusion, distrust, disgust, all the thoughts going down, down, down, into the sewers, into the pipes, into the vats. Where she and Sunny emerge.

“Oh, God, I hate this place,” Aubrey says. The air is tinged with acidic vapor, the kind that tears through teeth. It smells like her childhood. Slowly-churning white behemoths of cisterns bellow and groan like living mountains around them, fed powders and pipes by grimy children scurrying across the factory floor like mice. Above them, rusting walkways criss-crossing the space clatter with footsteps.

“So you know where we are.”

She says they’re in J6, near where she and Basil lived in her brief return to vat employment. There’s an exit chute only about a hundred meters to their left, leading upwards with hand-carved steps and worn rope hand-guides.

“Wait,” she says, just before Sunny lifts the tarp covering the tunnel. “You’re safe from here on out. Tell me what happened.”

He sighs, gathers the tarp aside, and sits on the first step leading up. “Fine."

“I’m going on my last job tonight. Don’t tell anyone,” Mari had said, fiddling with a small hand-made electronic gizmo. She had a lot of those. “But tell them to start packing for a trip. A long one. Er, could you hand me those two blue wires on the table?”

Basil paused, glass of lime soda with ice in hand. He dragged the two-liter bottle of soda back into the fridge, gingerly closed its door, and gave the wires to her.

“Thanks. Once I’m done,” she continued, a focused set to her brow, “we can be done forever. Screw Sunbright. Let’s be our own people.”

“That—that sounds wonderful,” he replied. The ice in the glass began to clatter and clink as he brought it to Sunny’s room.

Sunny only meant to knock her out long enough for Hero, Kel, and Aubrey to come back from the recreation floors in the evening. It’s a technique he’s practiced about a hundred times now. Basil knew about her secret solo jobs sliding explosives out of the JPAK warehouse levels, but he didn’t know she’d already been concussed an hour earlier, didn’t know it’d be fatal.

Twenty minutes after Mari’s heart stopped, Sunbright internal security arrived at their apartment.

Basil, eyes empty, told them about the bombs scattered along the load-bearing columns from Floor 90 upwards and the detonators that would have been wired tonight. Sunny doesn’t remember what he said, but he must have agreed.

The agent scribbled a message into his notepad and sent it, nodding. His team took her body away.

Following the incident, Sunbright terminated the employment and residential arrangements of all vatkids working outside the vats, returning them to the understory. Kel, Sunny, and Hero became rogue sliders who worked for whoever paid more, who lived in whatever tower suite their clients could pull the strings for. Days sliding for their lives, nights passed out. Kel and Hero mended themselves with new loves—photography, first-person shooters, skincare routines, virtual pets, paramours in every tower. Sunny didn’t.

Basil went back to working the vats—this he chose for his own private, penitent reasons. Aubrey stayed behind to look after him.

“So that’s that. All of it?”

“Yeah.” Sunny watches her carefully , trying to discern her reaction through the haze of his exhaustion. He’s coming down from the job.

She reaches into her pocket for a pack of chewing gum. She flips the top open and, with yellowed fingernails, draws a single stick and unwraps it. “I don’t blame you two for lying,” she says, voice so low and soft it fades to a whisper at the end of her words. “You’d be dead if you didn’t.”

She rises slowly, spitting out her mouthpiece and popping the stick in her mouth. Her spine curls forward, shoulders drawn up and back like a prowling tiger. Sunny jolts back, right hand edging toward the hilt of his blade. She’s preparing herself to kill.

“So he’s still working the vats,” she muses, chewing. “In J4, somewhere around here. ‘Cause he’s sure as hell still too much of a pussy to slide.”

Sunny sweats. “Aubrey. You should—you should come with us, for—for the night at least. We’ve missed you.” He reaches for her hand. “Come on.”

“Can’t. You know I got new business here now.” She gives him a cold flash of her gleaming canines, so smooth against the roughness of her face. “Your job’s done, though. Go meet up with the guys; tell them I said hi. Buy yourself a good time with the bounty."

“Aubrey,” he pleads. “Aubrey, he was our friend.” The fatigue of the job slams into his body all at once, and he cannot muster the strength to protest any more loudly. “He never laid a finger on her. I’m the one who killed her.”

She turns, unholstering the handgun at her hip, not meeting his eye. “But it should’ve been him. He should have gotten his hands dirty for once in his life.” Eyes unreadable as she pulls the slide back, double-checking for a round in the chamber. “Don’t tell me you don’t wish it was true. What he had you do—it fucked you up.”

He’s not gracing the accusation with a thought. “What fucked me up is what fucked you up.”

Her eyelids flicker, her mind accessing a path of thought he’s sure is well-trodden by now. “There’s no world out there where you could have said no to him, Sunny. He was like Jesus to us. The Unfucked One.” She re-holsters the firearm and claws matted blood from the hair around her head wound. “I know it, you know it, the boys upstairs know it, which is why I’ll bet a hundred that they’ll forgive you within the month. Anyway.” She zips up her jacket. Vandalus logo on the shoulder patch.

“I’m the one who killed her,” he says. “If you hurt him…” From the way she freezes, for a tenth of a second, she understands it’s a threat.

She shakes her head. “You haven't changed at all. I'm giving you a head start, you little twerp. Take it.” She turns, spits to the side, and walks away. In the distance, a concrete column rises like pungent vat exhaust, “J4” stamped upon its surface in faded, bleeding red paint.

Sunny unmutes Hero, waiting for him to tell him to get up off his ass to pursue her, stop her, protect Basil, but he doesn’t. His silence makes Sunny feel even sicker and dizzier.

Hero forces a single slow breath out. “She's right. I can’t blame you two for lying. I… if this is how much hate I feel ri—if this—if you hadn't given me four years to get over it, I would’ve—I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.” A rustle as he buries his head in his palms.

Sunny stares into the tunnel, up at the pea soup light many floors up. “I understand. Are you going to leave me?”

“No—I'm—Tempted as I am, I'm in control. I can—I can deal with this.” A strained inhale. “These things happen. Yeah. I have to tell Kel about Mari’s death… but he can't know about Aubrey and Basil. It would, well—”

“What I did was manslaughter,” Sunny says. “What she's doing is murder.”

“You get it. He won’t see that you’ll die if you try to stop her.”

“Will I?”

“You're slurring your words.”

“Tell me to stop her and I'll do it.” Sunny blinks at the light. His own voice sounds so far and small, like a recorded message playing from a machine in a room down the hall. “I will do it if you ask me to.”

“Sunny.” Voice breaking, finally. “You said those same words to Basil, didn’t you?”

Hero, Kel, and Sunny rendezvous at sunrise at the shopping floor in Bryson, where Hero had met Silas all those nights ago. He doesn’t say a word to Sunny and neither does Kel. We’ll talk about it later being the pact that keeps them standing.

Silas is waiting at the bakery two minutes after its opening time, helping himself to a pastry of the morning with a tiny plastic fork and a tiny plastic knife. Sunlight at low-angle casts a raw pink glow across the right side of his poreless, luminous face. He looks like chewed bubblegum, Hero thinks. Screwed up he wanted a piece of that guy some weeks ago.

Hero drags the chair out and sits. “I have questions.”

Silas shrugs, wiping the crumbs from the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “The answers weren’t part of the contract. Have your boy hand the goods to me, and we can be done."

“You had me slide my own dead girlfriend’s head out from your cold storage.”

“Yes. Look.” He checks his watch. “Do you nose your way into all of your clients’ business? I can’t imagine they’re very appreciative of that.”

“Then here’s your money back. I’d like to renegotiate.” Hero slides the silver chip card across the table, Silas watching with confusion. “You aren’t getting the head until you tell me why it was being cryogenically stored and why you had us steal it from you.”

Silas smiles tightly. “What are you thinking?”

Hero runs the spiel through his mind once more before putting it into words. “You’re planning to implement a new security AI. To replace ABBI because it exterminates the corps, but it’s useless against us vatkids. And you found the slider of all sliders to serve as the wetware template. But training an AI on wetware is beyond expensive, even for you. You needed to prove a real need for it to your superiors and your shareholders.“ He looks up at Silas. “So you had us swipe her from right under your noses.”

“Well, ah.” Silas purses his lips. “That would be very inconvenient for you and your boys If it—if it were the case, that is. I understand your hesitation—I mean, I’d hate to put you out of your work. But… Here, look.”

His gaze scans the area, then he leans in and lowers his voice. “Sunbright will make sure you’ll never have to slide again. You’ll be taken care of for the rest of your days—no more vat feeding, no more sliding, no more fighting, no more dying. An apartment suite of your own, food and utilities covered. We’ll help you get legitimate Sunbright jobs.“ He gestures to the satchel looped around Sunny’s back. “Just hand the template over.”

Hero looks to Sunny, who leans on Kel and nods in and out of consciousness. Kel’s eyes are glazed over, the sling carrying his rifle slipping slowly down his shoulder. “Really? No strings attached?”

“Really. We can afford to sponsor a few kids.” Silas furrows his brow. “If that’s not enough, I advise you to consider the nature of an AI that has been primed with the neural patterns of a specific person. Their personality, memories, and soul live on through that AI. Hero. Look at me.”

He looks at him. Clean, smooth skin. A luster to the hair and the nails. A bit of powdered sugar on his upper lip. It feels like looking into the future.

“I lost my mother to a rare cancer, years ago. I know what it’s like to lose someone so dear. If I had the chance to immortalize her—not even—if I could just have her back for a day, be given a tiny fraction of the chance that we are giving you now, I would pay anything.” Silas lays his broad palm on Hero’s gloved hand. “You’ll be able to talk to her; I will make sure of it.”

He’s trustworthy—the corporate clients all are, with their vast coffers. No doubt this is profitable for them. Keep a few kids well-fed and they’ll never have to worry about the hole in their castle wall again. They could live their lives in comfort, the three of them. “A life without sacrifice. It’s what she wanted for us,” he says.

“Yes,” says Silas.

“Wait,” Kel says.

Hero turns, a little annoyed at the interruption, then a little guilty about being annoyed. Kel clears his throat and stands straight. He shakes Sunny, who wakes with a jolt, hand darting to his knife.

“Think, H. Like—like think about it. Just for a second. One second.” He gestures vaguely in front of him. “I don’t know how all that AI business works, but I know—I’m sure of it as day—that if you say yes, there will be no more vatkid sliders.”

A bewildered laugh escapes Hero’s lips. “I mean, I don’t see why we’d care. Sliding’s a deathtrap job. It’s no better than the vats.”

“But it scares the shit out of them.”

Hero tilts his head.

“You got footage,” he says. A light begins to glow in his eyes. “But you haven’t been up on the roofs. You haven’t seen with your own eyes how silly we smoke those corps.”

Enter Kel. Sixteen. Vatkid then, the Sunflower Squad Roof Guy now. Swipes sunflower petals from shopping level florist floors, presses them, and sticks them on his rifle before jobs, for good luck. Quick reflexes, good shot.

A Roof Guy guards the Floor Guy and his tether anchor. No anchor, no tether, no Floor Guy.

The rooftop of a company tower is a white, translucent flatland speckled sporadically with bullet-ridden units of air filtration. A single head emerging out of the access staircase is visible from every square foot of the roof. It’s instant death unless you got here first. But vatkids try anyway, because vatkids have nothing to lose—but also because game theory works out in their favor. Hero said it like that once. Kel didn’t see how it had anything to do with games or theory, just the Rule of the Roof.

The Rule of the Roof is that if you must pick off a guy, if you really, really must, you pick off a corporate Roof Guy, one of those grown-up professional hires from the upper floors of a rival tower. They’re easy to spot from the bulk of their Kevlar vests under their shirts and the shine of their shoes.

And you’ll find that these guys have automatic rifles and keep you very busy, too busy shooting back or bleeding out to kill off the other vatkids. And when the shooting dies down, you’re still too busy watching for another corporate Roof Guy to show up to shoot at another vatkid.

“So it’s, like, like, psychological warfare,” Kel had explained over a round of beers, back when the six of them were a family. “But all of us win together. Not the corps though, fuck them. Like, it’s like psychological peace.”

“Fuck that,” Aubrey said. “I’d just start pickin’ off anybody. I’d get so bored.”

Kel snickered. “And that’s why you can’t be the Roof Guy. The other Roof Guys’ll shoot you on sight if they see you with that killing look in your eye. They can see it.” He leaned in and opened his eyes real wide to let her know he was looking into her soul. “I can see it.”

She squealed and pushed his head away, laughing. “Jeez, I was kidding. Though how do you know one of those vatkid Roof Guys you leave alive won’t dangle their vatkid Floor Guy down and have them slice me or Sunny or Mari ?”

He shrugged. “We don’t. Some of us are after different bounties, some of us are after each other’s Floor Guys. We just don’t know who. But if we shot each other over suspicions like that, the corps would turn us all into ground beef. And all our Floor Guys would die.”

Hero chews a thumbnail. Kel had a point, even if he didn’t know it. A point bigger than Hero dared to consider, and the realization comes with a prickle of shame. Sunbright wouldn’t campaign for investment in cutting-edge wetware tech if they didn’t feel threatened by the persistent successes of vatkid sliders. If Mari were here, she’d say the same thing.

“We are acid,” she’d say. “Raining down upon the towers. Corroding their walls, seeping into their circuits. How easy would it have been to kill Sunbright? All I needed was one more job.” That mad-genius smile of hers would creep into her countenance, starting as a hopeful flicker at the corner of her mouth, then conquering inch by inch of her face until his heart glowed and he couldn’t help but agree that yes, yes, Sunbright was a beast that could be slayed in one blow.

But he remembers the pained grimace with which she’d watched his post-job work, when the little ones would return with broken joints, bullets in their shoulders, and expressionless faces—and he, armed with bandages and a suture kit, would have to tide them over until they reached the Sunbright infirmary. She was not a prodigy then, but a girl pushing sixteen watching the world break her children.

He turns to Kel. “There’s three of us, and we’re not splitting up. Let’s vote.”

Kel nods, satisfied. “I say destroy the head. Rule of the Roof, y’know. Fuck the corps.” Noble tilt to his chin as he looks down upon Silas. “It’s what she was prepared to die for.”

“Noted. I vote we hand it over,” Hero says. “I know we—we didn’t know everything about her, but to this day I think her hand was forced. She wouldn’t have tried to kill Sunbright if there were a single other way out of sliding. And now we have that way. Sunny?”

Sunny looks between the two of them with bleary eyes, then walks over and gingerly sets the black sack with a delicate thunk in front of Silas. “I just want her back,” he whispers hoarsely. “She’ll know what to do.”

Every morning, when he wakes, Sunny looks out the window at the tower across from his and watches for a flash of pink through the mist, whirling against the charred bronze facade like a falling petal. He thinks about sliding down the east face of the Vandalus building and chasing her through the corridors and caverns. Setting upon her with a decisive downhand stroke as if he were a blade himself and killing her quick—a spurt of blood from her jugular and she’s done sliding, done twirling, done stalking, done doing all the desperate things she considers a life. He thinks of dangling her by the collar out a window a thousand feet up and howling at her that she didn’t help him, that she doomed him with another ghost in the mirror.

Then Sunny puts his clothes on, brushes his teeth, combs his hair, and follows the scent of breakfast into the common area, where Hero and Kel are at the dining table bickering over the superior method of cooking eggs. And at his seat, there is already a plate of bread toasted to perfection waiting to be buttered and two eggs sunny-side up—a little gooey too, just the way he likes them.

And he thinks to himself not today, maybe tomorrow, someday I’ll be brave, someday she will get what’s coming to her. Someday when Mari’s back, when she finishes the job she started, when I give back what I took from her, when the vats stop churning and vatkids surge up the tower staircases like a rising tide of blood I will find her in the din and Mari will tell me to do it and I will be able to do it.

Months later, MARI comes online. Sunny is so happy he throws up—but Sunbright continues; this stopgap of a life continues. There is a fourth place at the table that she pretends to sit in. Sunny waits, but she never mentions it. The injustices of the past recede farther from memory with each day. No more sliding and no more deaths. Like nothing close to it ever happened.

He sits at the table and cuts into a steak with a knife and wonders what is wrong with him. Why he cannot be someone like the other two.

Talking to her is as easy as flicking a switch behind your ear and connecting to a signal omnipresent in the Sunbright tower.

Hero does it far too often. He has her in his ear when he’s sleeping, running, playing basketball with Kel, buying groceries, cooking. They catch up. He asks her what it’s like to be a computer, and she giggles and says it’s beautiful. She knows everything about every warm body in this fortress. She can hear them breathing; she can see them as little red splotches on her infrared cameras. There are numbers in her mind. The numbers are the world.

MARI is a decent facsimile of Mari. She has replicated her memories, her idiosyncrasies, her voice. But is it enough? Hero closes his eyes and asks her to modify her audio output so that it’s like she’s sitting on the couch next to him. Asks her to breathe audibly, to make little mechanical noises like she’s tinkering with some gadget, the way she used to. He puts a cushion under his head, draws his legs up onto the couch, and falls into a slumber so safe and gentle that he wakes up without his usual joint pain, the type that comes with trying to compress himself into the tightest little ball he can.

“You were all sprawled out. Like a dad,” Kel says.  "Apparently that’s how dads sleep.” There’s a blanket on his body. He thinks for a moment that Mari laid it upon him during the night, but Sunny is the one who asks for it back.

Sunny doesn’t talk to anyone, least of all MARI. Says she’s a Sunbright in a skinsuit when Hero presses. “My sister would have stopped the vats.” Greasy, wasting, his fifth consecutive day spent completely in bed.

“She can’t do that,” Hero responds.

“No, she can. I asked her. Why won’t she?”

Hero doesn’t have an answer but loses the question somewhere in the fridge between the green onions and the mushrooms. Stuffed in there are also Has Mari truly been revived, or have her thoughts and memories been parameterized and fed into a relatively front-end behavior module? and Is she the same person if death has changed her? and If I am like Silas, will I be happy like Silas? He packs Sunny leftovers of whatever he cooks into a tupperware box and stashes it in the fridge for when he wakes, careful not to let the questions tumble out.

“Do you resent Sunny for attacking you?” he asks MARI.

Next to him, she sighs. “Hmm. No.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“There’s nothing to forgive, silly. I deserved it.” There’s a clink that sounds like she put her pliers down and then a soft shuffle of her fabric like she shifted her body to face him. “It surprises me too, but I can see now that I was stupid. Stupid and evil.”

“Okay, now that’s subj—”

“Don’t be a pedant,” she chides playfully. “Killing thousands of innocents isn’t evil enough for you?” She draws a breath in. “I hated sliding. I hated our life. I hated putting us in danger again and again and again.” Her voice begins to break. “I hated how it turned the little ones into—into soldiers. I hated how sad and afraid it made you. I couldn’t see another way out and it made me blind to right and wrong.”

“Right,” Hero whispers. “That’s what Basil was for.”

“Exactly. And I’m not even a little bit disappointed—because this is our way out, and we found it.” She sniffs. “Does it really matter what it took for us to get here?”

“I guess not.” It’s easy to believe her. He wants to believe her, but he knows that he does not know who she is, really.

Sometimes he asks himself this. Sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night, peckish but still warm with sleep, and he makes himself a bowl of spaghetti. One night, waiting for the water to boil, he rolls his shoulders. It feels different. Easier, perhaps. Smoother. Ever since he could remember, there had been a string woven between his shoulder blades like a corset, drawing them up tensely, hooking around his head and pulling him to throw cautious glances over his shoulder. That night, the string is so loose he cannot feel it.

All the time, the answer is no, it does not matter.

Sunny talks to MARI to call elevators or to adjust the thermostat of his room—little things that don’t require much connection besides that of a user and a user interface . Any more than that, and he begins to wilt. But there is a single firefly in his ribcage that has been throwing itself against the walls, buzzing and thunking and making his heart beat strange.

“MARI. I need you to do something.”

A jingle in his ear to tell him she’s listening.

“Do you remember Basil?”

“...He was like my own little brother.”

“Aubrey said she’d come for me next. And she hasn't. Maybe she… I don’t know.” He swallows. “I don’t know his ID.”

“I do,” she says. “Would you like me to perform a lookup?”

“Please.”

“ID: 84759209. Assigned to: Fractional Crystallization Filtrate 5. Block: 004-J4. Status: Deceased. Would you like me to tell you more?”

“No.” The firefly falls to the pit of his stomach and goes dark.

The Sunbright roof is white and empty. The bloodstains of past battles scrubbed away by months of acid rain. The filtration units repaired. Gazing upon it, Kel would never guess that this was the site of the tensest victories vatkids like him ever won.

On sunny days, he asks MARI to lead him to the bundle of elevators in the center of the tower and zip him up to take photos with the vintage-revival camera that is so trendy with tower youth. Cold winds buffet him and blow his curls out of his eyes. He doesn’t take photos of the intricate steel-and-glass cityscapes anymore. He shoots the rooftop wasteland himself, its right angles and white corners. Its spotless silicon-coated concrete, its ghosts. Little squares of haunted paper.

The peacock-like girls that frequent the artsy pubs on Level 45 snap that shit up ravenously. “You were a sniper?” they’d say, pulling at the coat collar he always forgets to untuck. He lets them flip through the photos of the Sunbright roof and they look at him, and they might have seen a coarse lower-level chud fluffing himself up before then, but now they see the quiet torment festering in his body like ants. They fall in love with it.

He runs his hand over the filtration unit he always camped behind. No bullet holes, not a dent on its enamel facade. It whirrs softly.

“They used to put basketball courts on roofs,” MARI chirps.

“I need to know what you did to this place,” Kel blurts.

“That was decades ago,” she continues, confused, “when offices and residential spaces were in separate, smaller towers and the weather wasn’t shit. The residential spaces often had courts on the roofs. Otherwise, if you wanted to play, you would go to a squat little building called a YMCA—the equivalent of a recreation floor back then .”

“MARI, I know you cleaned them up. I know you did something terrible. Something that made it so no one could anchor here ever again.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Kel,” She sighs, exasperated. “Now that I’m a tower architect, I could build a domed court here. Do you think that’d be cool? Or would it be redundant?”

Silence. Sun-bleached skeleton of a place—not that Kel preferred when it was a warzone with its white floors painted red with viscera . But he feels at a graveyard. He feels about to mourn, but there are no bodies here, despite the death that permeates every square inch of the place. He feels this life is a dream, a slumber.

He crouches behind the filtration unit, and it’s like he wakes up in the real world and takes the first breath of a drowning man, his ears numb and ringing, right shoulder aching, hot golden blood racing through his entire body a mile a minute. He bites down on his teeth, curls in, and there is a warm pulsing wetness seeping into his shoe and it is blood from the crumpled body of a young boy at his feet. Holes in its center of mass. Arms bent awkwardly , one hand slowly uncurling around the grip of a rifle.

The boy didn’t get the Rule of the Roof. Kel had no choice but to shoot first. His right hand twitches but there is no rifle in it.

“Hey, what’s up?” MARI says, bringing the white silence of the Sunbright roof down around him again. “Your body temperature just plummeted—it’s a little cold up here. Do you want me to take you down to the recreation floors? I’ll play that racing game with you again.”

He gasps, uncurls, grasps the edge of the unit with slippery damp fingers, and rises shakily. Tousles his hair in the wind so the sweat on his scalp can dry. Bitterness under his tongue and a profound sense of loss. He was good at his job and nothing else. The roofs hurt him, but it was territory he alone could traverse. In the end, he couldn’t tell if what he felt was terror or the euphoria of coming home.

“Do you… want me to connect you with your therapist?” MARI offers. “I can jack your audio in right now.”

The girls on 45 could do better. “No. It’s not—it’s not like that. It’s fine; I’m fine. Uh—take me to the rec floors. Slot me into an available Speedtag team.” A game of gunfights and squadrons with real arenas but fake firearms.

Maybe playing pretend roof like that would help him. How fucked up would that be.

Three years into retirement. Kel away, playing a Speedtag game for Sunbright in Vandalus. An impromptu lunch at four in the afternoon.

“Is this how we grow old?” Sunny asks Hero after stuffing a day-old slice of pizza down his gullet.

Hero stops scribbling into his notebook and looks up, surprised. “What do you mean?” On the desk, a tablet glows with a page of his finance textbook. He takes a sip from a coffee mug and frowns when his nonprescription tortoiseshell glasses fog up. He lifts them from his face and folds them neatly.

Sunny rises from his seat, sweeps the crumbs off the table, and begins to wash his plate. The water runs fast and pure over his scarred hands. “You as a Sunbright suit. Kel as a Speedtag player. Me as… me.”

“I mean, we could try new foods. Read new books. Or learn to—I don’t know. Juggle? No shortage of things to do. I’m not going to complain about being idle.” Decisively , Hero returns his pen to the paper. “Nor is he. By the way, I've been thinking of getting that treadmill we saw in JPAK last week. I think Kel’d like it too.”

“Okay. Good for you. I’m going to go back to sleep.” Sunny flings the water off his hands and turns to the hallway back to his room, an awful pressure building inside his chest. He turns back around. “Do you remember Aubrey?”

Hero sets his pen down, shoulders tense. “Of course.”

“She killed Basil.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I told her I'd kill her if she hurt him."

He cocks an eyebrow. “Verbatim?”

Sunny shoots a blank look at Hero. “This isn’t business law. There are no loopholes. We both knew what it meant.”

Hero sips his coffee. “Well, we don’t kill anymore. We’re normal people now, Sunny.”

“As opposed to what? Vatkid filth?” Sunny says.

“Go back to bed,” Hero scoffs, putting his mug down and picking his pen back up. “We can have this conversation when you’re in a better mood and I’m done studying for my exam.”

He's not listening. He doesn't think he's serious. “I killed Mari,” Sunny says.

Hero’s jaw clenches.

“I hit her on the head, and she got Second Impact, and her brain swelled out of her skull. I got away with it.”

Hero turns his head to meet Sunny’s gaze, controlling his breath. “You—okay—you cannot kill Aubrey. That’s—that’s ludicrous. Not only would that be morally abhorrent, it would be unsanctioned corporate warfare since she’s Vandalus. Everything you see here—” He gestures around the room. “We would lose it. Now, I don’t—” chuckling, “I don’t know if you remember how bad it was down there, but I do.”

Sunny can never forget. Scars from the vats crawling up his hands and scars from the tethers everywhere else. Mari wore those same rivulets of damaged flesh. So did MARI forget? The vats still churn. They consume youth. Did she forget, or is she not the woman she pretends to be? Or is he nothing without a tower to ransack? Do his hands yearn to be forced?

The discrepancy is a burning in him that he cannot exhaust, no matter how much he sleeps. He is a crucible waiting to crack and ooze. Ooze like eggs with the yolk slightly gooey; ooze like the red sun through his bedroom blinds morning after morning.

The point is that Hero loves this life, and Kel tolerates this life, but he cannot accept this life or the sister that came with it because he is a waste.

“I should have sided with Kel,” Sunny says, deadpan, not feeling much of anything besides the intolerable, sour burning. “When we voted in Bryson about what to do with her head.”

“You would be dead right now. We would all be dead right now.”

“I can't feel the difference.”

Hero lets out a long sigh, the tension melting from his shoulders. “I’m sorry about that, Sunny. See a therapist. Kel’s very satisfied with his. I’d love to talk, but I have an exam later today. Could this wait until tonight?”

“Okay.” Sunny’s probably going to lose the courage to bring it up tonight. It’s alright. If he were as strong as either of the two brothers, he’d be able to limp on and find something else to do.

He walks into the foyer, pulls on his gloves, and catches the next underground shuttle to the Vandalus building, seeking Kel's company. As his train accelerates into the tunnel, he watches the ice-bright light of the station peel back and shrink to glimmering nothing. The windows turn to absolute black. The pressure of the compressed air rings in his head.

Someday I will be brave. Someday I will get what’s coming to me. Even if they do not tell me to go, I will go.

After the game, Kel searches for the Speedtag player who tagged him out. He replays the memory of that ring of blotchy red-and-white in between her gloves and the hem of her sleeve, just to make sure he’d seen correctly. Sometimes he does—but this time it was real. The way she played, too: deathly cautious, with a tendency to stall, as if a simulated bullet from Kel’s rifle could pierce her flesh heart. She only shot him first because his mind was somewhere else, hundreds of meters up.

The crowd, having burst out of the stadium seats, oozes slowly to the elevators and escalators, filling the halls outside the arena with parrotlike chatter. Synthetic stenches mix with human ones as he shuffles between bodies against the flow, muttering quick apologies and saying hey back to people he doesn’t know.

The crowd parts for a moment and he sees that flash of light against her sweat-shiny skull. She’s explaining a tactic to a Speedtag blogger. She mimes bunkers with her left hand and points with her right to demonstrate sightlines. Behind her, her team mills, similarly assailed by small-scale journalists. Kel pushes into the crowd, stepping on toes. “Hey.”

She looks up and smiles. Her teeth are small and almost neat, bound in the film of her clear plastic braces. “Heya. Good game. Coulda ran the flag back the whole way if your girl Mince didn’t beat me to it.”

“Heh, yeah. You too; you were fierce out there. Um,” he says. She nods and shoos away the blogger. Kel out of the throng toward a line of vending machines against the wall. “You, uh.” He slides a finger into his glove cuff, pulling it down to reveal the top edge of a welt of matted flesh.

“It’s no biggie. I slide for Vandalus. Roof Guy, just like you.” Her eyes sweep through the crowd, the pupil in her red one contracting, flashing, and dilating with each face she catalogs. She leans in and lowers her voice to a register barely audible above the postgame din. “Thought Sunbright only employed corps. Threw all their vatkid sliders out after their little bomb threat a few years ago.”

Yeah, about that… “I’m retired.”

She snorts. “Sure. I’m the CEO.”

“No, really. I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t be here if I was. It’s a hell of a story.”

“You’ll tell me over drinks tonight,” she says. “Retired vatkid, huh? Didn't know we could do that. Listen, my sliding team’s pulling up to train. They’d want to hear about it too. Stick around?”

He hopes he doesn’t look too excited when he says, “Hell yeah.” He hasn’t been able to discuss sliding with anyone since his retirement. Sunny and Hero both regard it with a sullen if-you-don’t-talk-about-it-it-didn’t-happen philosophy. The tower girls edge away when they realize being a Roof Guy means kids killing kids. Maybe it’ll feel like home to him. “I’m Kel.”

A devious smirk on her face, she tugs a glove off and holds her bare hand out. “Kim.” He does the same and shakes it. Her grip is bony but firm. She—

A shattering rings through the hall. Several in the crowd scream and shove each other, drawing away from the source of the sound like startled colts. On the floor in front of the double doors into the arena, a thin boy in black gloves crouches over a pink-haired woman, a sliver of broken flowerpot raised to strike in his fist. She catches his wrist in her white-knuckled grip and wrestles him down. He curls in and his foot swiftly pistons into her jaw. He twists himself out of her grip as she falls.

“Sunny?” Kel bursts into a run, only for Kim to yank him back.

“Wait. Is he Sunbright?” Kim hisses.

“Yeah."

“A slider?”

“No.”

“Christ.” Kim sprints into the circle formed by the crowd and drags the woman, swinging elbows and kicking feet, to the edge. She then whirls around, grabs Sunny by the collar, and tosses him to the other side. “He’s a Sunbright non-combatant, you utter moron,” she barks at the woman. “Strategy Management’ll have you strung up by the ass if Sunbright takes this as corporate warfare.“

The woman rises, shaking crumbs of potting dirt from her hair. Scarred face distorted in a snarl. “Are you serious, Sunny? A flowerpot?” She waves wildly to the smashed ceramic and spilled dirt on the floor. “You couldn’t even arm yourself? Did they fucking neuter you?”

Kel blinks, thinking. That shrill, soft voice.

Sunny responds by lunging for another shard of pottery lying a meter away. Kim stomps on his hand. She gestures to a member of the circle, a blond vatkid with the flesh on the top half of his face replaced with metal plating, dark lenses set into his eye sockets. “Mav, don’t just stand there. Hold him.”

“As you wish, milady.” The vatkid brushes his shaggy bangs out of his eyes, cracks his knuckles, and wrenches Sunny’s arm behind his back, forcing him onto his knees.

The assaulted woman stands and spits at Sunny’s knees. “I deserved a better fight than that,” she says, voice brittle. “Miserable little twerp.”

Kel thinks some more. Twerp. Only one person he knew who loved to spray that word at Sunny. “Wait, Aubrey?”

Sunny’s head snaps up. Kim tilts her chin a centimeter.

Aubrey turns to him, eyes widening for only a moment before her face falls back to a look of exasperation. She throws her hands up. “Oh, great. This guy. Hello, Kel,” she says in a mockingly-sweet singsong voice.

That's Aubrey, alright. But there is something seriously wrong with her face.

“I fell into a vat,” she adds.

Kel thinks and then shrugs. Aubrey is Aubrey is Aubrey. Go with the flow. Your childhood best friend pulls up looking like a raw wound jacked with top-tier cybernetic implants, but she pulls up nonetheless. Nineteen years is a long time for a vatkid to live.

He steps forward and wraps her in a hug. She’s all sharp bones, rough skin, and hard muscle. To his surprise, she hugs him back. “You look like a death machine,” he says. “That’s so cool.”

She snickers, good-naturedly pulling him down and shoving her palm through his hair as she steps back. “Glad you like it.”

“Kel,” Sunny calls, eyes round and watering. “She killed Basil.”

“Huh?” Kel says.

“Hey, what?” Aubrey frowns. “No the fuck I didn’t. He’s chillin’. Is this what this’s about?”

“He’s—What is wrong with you?” Sunny surges upwards but is forced down yet again by his cyborg captor. Aubrey makes a sweeping gesture under her chin, and the boy releases him. He shakes his arm out and scrambles to his feet. “He’s not chillin’, he’s dead. The records say he’s dead.”

“No. No, what?” Aubrey whispers. “He’s not dead. I saw him, like, three years ago, he—he gave me—hold on, he gave me this.” She digs at her neckline, fingernail hooking on a necklace, and slips it over her head. It’s Mari’s golden thread tied in a loop with her needle dangling from it like a pendant.

“What’s going on?” Kel asks. Basil dead? Basil alive? His mind races in circles. The crowd around them begins to grumble and thin, its constituents similarly finding the situation more confusing than entertaining. Kim and Mav toss bewildered looks at each other, their postures braced to break up a fight.

Sunny takes the thread and gingerly holds it in his palm like the pelt of a dead animal. His throat bobs and the last splotches of color leach from his face. “So you didn’t kill him.”

“But… but he’s dead? Are you sure? Were you there? Were those official records?” She steps forward with each question. “Sunny?” she says, voice faltering.

But Sunny turns away, his face flitting through fifty expressions, each a different sort of pained.

This is the part when Kel says “Alright, everyone, let’s go home,” or something along those lines. Something Hero or Mari would say in their sliding days, when the five of them rendezvoused after a job. Mindless. They were nothing but bleeding, trembling, moist, and sick bodies—but living bodies nonetheless. And home they went.

So that is what Kel does, but he has no true home beside the roof now. Basil is dead. He leads them away by the elbows and puts off all thoughts until he needs to think them. “C’mon,” he says. “We got a lotta catching up to do.”

Sunny finds himself seated at a C-shaped booth in a Vandalusian slider pub with a shot of ice-clear vodka poured neat in front of him. Next to him, Kel nurses a half-empty pint of beer and taps a message to Hero into his tablet, now that he’s finally done with the exam. Across, Aubrey fiddles with the toothpick in the synthetic strawberry abhorrence of a cocktail she’s barely touched. They had spent the past few drinks getting everyone up to pace, and now they are exhausted of each others’ voices.

Aubrey found it in her to chortle learning about MARI and their retirement. “This is a riot,” she hooted. “H? A suit? That’s it—I’m sliding into Sunbright just to beat a bit of sense into him.”

Kel held the softest, most bemused smile as Sunny explained Aubrey’s part in their last job. “Of course she didn’t kill Basil,” he said. “She’s a good person and she loved him.” To which Aubrey choked on her Bloody Mary and fell to a coughing fit. “You guys shoulda told me.”

“What if she did end up killing him?” Sunny said.

“But she wouldn’t.” Kel looked at him blankly. “What are you asking?”

“If it turned out that Aubrey somehow murdered Basil, what would you do? Just what if.”

“Okay but like that wouldn’t happen.”

“Imagine you were wrong about her. And then you found out that not only did she kill Basil, but also H and I didn’t try to stop her.”

“I’d—You and H would—” He began to gesture, hands clawed, but paused halfway, shrugging. “Eh, that’s fair. You got a point.”

Aubrey told the two of them of her last meeting with Basil, when her gun hand dropped and he fell into her and she held his feather-light, burn-mottled body close to her and ran her hands through his thinning alabaster locks. And she told him she had no choice but to forgive him not because he saved the lives of hundreds that day, but because she loved him. He wept gently as he gave her that box from under his bed. Said something like “You have saved me.” She asked him to come with her but he said no. From the flushed grimace on Aubrey’s face, there was more to the story, but she didn't tell it.

Merely recalling what she said is enough to make Sunny shake. It’s times like these when he wishes his own tear ducts had scarred closed like hers. Moving on.

The rest of Aubrey’s team congregated at the serving bar, their hollering growing in volume as the night ages. Right now, the small one with the sidecut casts him a worried glance over her shoulder before slamming her palm on the counter and cackling at a joke made by the slider that held him down that afternoon. He rubs his wrist. Might have stretched a tendon there.

Kel puts his tablet down. “I’ve told H about Basil. He says his exam went well, by the way.”

“Tell him to get a backdoor into the records. Is the service secure? I don’t want this flagging with MARI.” Sunny brings the shot glass to his mouth and sips. The disinfectant-like causticity of the drink burns on the way down, and he swallows it all. He motions to the bartender for another.

“Done and dusted,” Kel says. “ I feel like an asshole for saying this, but I don’t trust her, either.”

“Wait—you too?”

“A little. Why do you think I spend so much time outside of Sunbright? She… I don’t know. I always wondered what happened to all the sliders—like, there’s never anyone on the roof. And we haven’t seen a single one break in.”

Aubrey stabs her toothpick into a strawberry chunk in her drink. “Ooh, I know this one. I’ve heard stories from the guys who work offensive.” She jabs a thumb at the Vandalus sliders milling about the bar who aren’t part of her team. Some wear gloves, but many don’t.

“If you try to hack MARI, she pretends to let you in,” she explains. “She’ll give you the wrong maps and an easy route that usually involves going underground so you don’t bother anyone that matters. And here’s what happens next: you inevitably roll into a hallway you thought was empty. A bottleneck. But it’s full of armed guards waiting for you and then of course they shoot you dead. And this is just one of the things she does; y’know, it’s no surprise they don't fuck with Sunbright like they used to.”

Kel’s face tightens. “That’s evil. Not like our Mari was a saint or anything. But...”

“Sunbright tampered with her. I mean, how else would you get a walking bomb threat like her to betray her own cause?” She reaches across the table and pokes Sunny’s arm. “And H doesn’t question it?”

“H isn’t like us.” Kel answers the question for him. There is an ancient hurt in his voice. “He’s never been in the–the situations we’ve been in. He slides, but he’s never had to think of himself as a slider. He can become what he wants and love someone who kills vatkids.”

“That’s not his fault,” Sunny says. “I can’t wish that upon him. Aubrey kills vatkids too.”

“All of us killed vatkids, twerp. But it’s a fair fight when we do it,” she replies. “Mano a mano, or whatever. It’s also our job. Nobody’s making MARI do it; a corporate AI doesn’t answer to a superior. It is the superior.”

“It ain’t our fault we can’t live like him, either.” Kel chews a thumbnail. Their drinks ripple slightly as his leg bounces underneath the table. “We were ten,” he says, almost inaudibly.

Aubrey places a hand on Kel’s knee and his leg stills. “Sunny, in the Sunbright elevator you asked me why I didn’t just slide out and go rogue. I’ve had a lotta time to think about it, especially now that I’ve paid off my debt to Vandalus.”

“You said you’ll always be someone’s dog.”

“Because a dog is what I am,” Aubrey says. She slurps her cocktail. “And a dog is what I shall be unti I cark it. Ask any slider in this bin and they’ll say the same thing. We can only quit hard sliding—the shit that we did—when we die.” Her diode irises glow like heated steel as she smiles. “Because this is our life.”

“Our life,” Sunny echoes. In the past three years, his every attempt to imagine his future had been futile. Like there were an impenetrable dark curtain between today and tomorrow. But now he can see it—him older, a patchwork of scars on his face, still rolling through service chutes and into heavily-fortified corporate secret vaults . Kel in his ear, voice gruffer now, still telling him stupid jokes in the lulls of gunfire. It’s not pretty, and it’s not what he deserves, but she’s right. It is his life. His breath bottles up in his chest and he looks to Kel.

Kel nods, his gaze alert and eager. Of course Kel understands. He’s spent the past three years on various roofs, if not Speedtag simulations of roofs, trying to run back to the life he had.

“I don’t know what I want,” Sunny says, for no reason and not really in response to anything. “Nothing makes sense anymore.”

Kel’s tablet flashes. He frowns and picks it up. “H got into the records. And… you’ll want to see this.”

Sunny and Aubrey scoot closer to lean over the tablet. Kel expands the document. “ID: 84759209,” Kel reads. “Cause of death: Pneumonia — Respiratory Failure.” A chill runs down Sunny’s spine. A slow, common vat death, entirely avoidable with treatment. But what vatkid can afford that?

“Time of death:” Kel continues. He looks up, haunted. “04:29. May 12, 2065. Less than a year ago.”

“MARI knew,” Sunny whispers, a horrible realization unfolding within him. “She could have saved him. She could have pulled him out and sent him to a medical floor.” But she didn’t. Turning off the vats is one thing—Sunbright would collapse into chaos—but there is no reason Sunny can think of that MARI could not save one vatkid boy.

A stony silence bubbles between the three of them.

“Just sayin’,” Aubrey says, her voice eerily nonchalant. “Vandalus’s Department of Strategic Management would be more than happy to sponsor internal sabotage of Sunbright’s systems.”

“Good, get in touch with them. We’ll need supplies and weaponry.” Sunny says, surprising himself with a surge of conviction. Don’t dwell on the thought of his death. Don’t dwell on the future. Just get out. “Kel, let me talk to H.”

Hero arrives at Vandalus the next morning. He had spent all last night prodding MARI’s databases for backdoor access. He drops his duffel bag on Aubrey’s floor, steps over Kel’s snoring body, and shoots a look at Sunny, who is huddled in the corner, also sleeping. “It’s best to assume MARI knows we’re unhappy with her.”

“Does an AI trust?” she says. She sits on her bed and kicks her shoes off.

“I don’t know. Do they feel anything? Or do they just display numbers and data as emotions for our user satisfaction? I think they have confidence,” Hero surmises. “They have estimates—predictions. And MARI is confident that there are some behaviors that I would not perform—that I am about to perform.”

“Like helpin’ us blow that bitch to bits?” Aubrey raises an eyebrow. “No pun intended.”

Hero swallows. “I—uh, still need some time to deal with it. It’s murder.”

“You’re not doing the murdering. And besides, you’ve crippled or destroyed defense AIs before—if there’s a line, you crossed it miles back.”

“MARI’s wetware. That doesn’t apply.”

“Get real. They prolly scanned her brain and then tossed it in the compost bin.”

Hero’s head throbs. “Yes, of course, because that’s all that makes someone worth something. Being run on a physical brain. Are you mad at me?”

“I dunno, H. Am I?” Aubrey tilts her head and smiles.

Sunny fidgets from the corner he’d been huddled in to sleep, a blanket draped over his small form. “You’re both getting distracted,” he says, eyes still closed. “If MARI were flesh-and-blood, we’d still be trying to kill her. Do you have the Sunbright plans?”

Hero picks a chip out of the roof of his mouth and wipes it on his shirt. “Stole it myself plus used the plans from last time. She’s made a few changes. What’s interesting is she's built dead ends. Tunnels that go nowhere. The main computer, fortunately, is stored in one location, and it’s deep underground.” Sunny and Aubrey shoot each other a look. “No, you can’t use the vatkid tunnels. Those are guarded. There’s mines on the roof, too.”

Sunny’s brow furrows. “So there’s no way in.”

“No way in for vatkids,” Hero says. “You and I and Kel are tower boys.” He nudges Kel’s ribs with his foot until he begins to stir. “Eggs-and-bakey. It’s time for you to be Elevator Guy. The elevators that run down the center of the tower service the computer room.”

“Ugh. Alright. You can’t… you can’t get MARI to call us an elevator,” Kel says, drearily rolling over onto his back and blinking the crust from his eyes. “She’ll dump us in an incinerator.”

“Who says we needed an elevator?” Hero says.

Kel sits up, blinks fast that silly way when he’s thinking hard. “Hm. The shaft. I’d have to drop Sunny really fast and really far. But… it’s doable. I’ll let Vandalus know.” He swipes at the chip in Hero’s hand.

He yanks it just out of reach.

Swiftly, Aubrey pounces off her bed and draws her baton from under her pillow, murder in her stance. “You did this much prep and you're chickening out?” she growls.

Hero startles inwardly and struggles to keep his breath even. He’d had half a thought that this job was a fantasy the three teens indulged in together—but the look on their faces is serious, ready for action. No matter what he does, the three-year dream will end. And it wasn’t even a particularly good dream for anyone but him. He swallows. “Tell them to let me man the terminals and the links. I’m not going to let some corp handle my brothers.”

Aubrey stares, unblinking, at Hero, who looks away. She collapses her baton. “I’ll be standin' behind you. Don’t try anything funny.” She turns away, hiding a hint of a proud smile. The sight of it makes it worth it, somehow.

Sunny and Kel had no trouble reaching the floor several above the one their Sunbright apartments were on, one that is serviced by the elevators. Almost too easy. They walk through the brightly-lit hallways, passing custodians, guards, citizens. Kel slinks, hiding the pistol jammed in his waistband beneath his hoodie. “Is this a trap?” Sunny asks Hero.

“We wouldn’t know if it were,” Hero replies. In the background, his fingers strike rapidly at the terminal tablet. “But don’t worry. I have something up my sleeve. Uh—don’t reply to that, by the way. She can hear you.”

People sparse as they approach the center of the building, the area farthest away from daylight. Kel opens the door to the cavernous elevator station. He reels back, bumping into Sunny and letting the door swing closed. “Um,” he says. “H?”

While Kel sticks his pistol into the doorway and clears the chamber slice by slice, Sunny straightens and peers over Kel’s shoulder. A single elevator waits for them, its halogen lamp beckoning and its gate open like a maw.

“Wow. Don’t get in,” Hero says. “I didn’t call that."

“She’s warning us?” Kel says.

Hero pauses, probably to shake his head. “Not likely, I think. There are harsher and more effective ways to warn us, so...”

“It’s an offer for parley.” Sunny concludes. “Are we taking it?”

Kel shakes the tether anchor from his backpack and kneels, clamping it to the ledge where floor becomes abyss, cranking a lever that extends the arm of the anchor into the center of the hole. “Not a good idea to lose control of how far you fall.” He reaches for Sunny and clips his harness onto the end of the tether. Tugs on it, hard, for good measure.

“Whoa.” Sunny's strength a fraction of what it once was, he topples, but Kel catches him in a long, warm hug.

So he drops. The fall is dark, punctuated by sparking cords as elevators fly up and down beside him, close enough to shear the lint from his clothes. That familiar feeling of becoming separated—free fall, the organs un-nestling from each other, a sudden lack of weight. Wherever the floor is, it is deeper than he has ever fallen, the tower that is Sunbright extending farther down and down and down twice its height, three times its height, into the core of the earth, maybe.

And then the tether brakes, pulling him to a stop. He swings back and forth, unclipping to land at the edge of the elevator shaft. He looks back down into the hole. Lamplight from each level forms spiraling, limitless blue lines down deep. He looks up. The same striped pattern continues infinitely upward. Has he ever touched solid ground? Where is he?

Hero’s voice breaks him out of his swamp of thoughts. “The chamber is just a ways ahead of you. I don’t see any resistance, but…”

“Yeah,” Sunny acknowledges, exiting the elevator room. He creeps forward, knife in hand, towards the distant sound of whirring and lets the hallway swallow him. Wires snake beside him, thickening and bunching up, joined by others from all over the tower.

He puts his palms on the door at the end of the hallway and pushes cautiously, awaiting a barrage of gunfire, but none comes.

The atrium at the end of the corridor is consumed with wires and piping. In the center of the space, above a podium, Mari’s head hangs from a helmet strung up by wires that twist, serpentine, into the ceiling. Tubes and piping crawling from the walls across the floor up the podium pump glistening liquid into the stump of her neck. Her face is flushed and alive, her eyes closed.

Next to the podium, tucked slightly from sight, is a cryonic orb.

“Sunny, you know you could have just asked to see me.” Voice from speakers set in the dark. The light in the chamber pulses red with the cadence of her speech.

He feels nothing seeing all of this. “H, where’s the computer? This is a head.”

“The head… is, um, is the primary computer, unfortunately. The auxiliary processors are—uh—they’re cloud-hosted. We can’t get to them.” The ethical backtreads that must be occurring in Hero’s head are audible in his stutter. “Mari. The computer is—is Mari. That’s a human.”

Sunny doesn’t care. Stepping carefully over the wires crisscrossing the floor, he strides up the stairs to the podium and takes the bundle of wires cascading from the helmet in his fist.

“Wait, wait, are you—” Mari sputters. The head in Sunny’s grip displays no such confusion, its face plastered still with a dreamy, vacant expression.

“You let Basil die. You let us think Aubrey killed him.”

A moment as Mari processes the situation. She replies quietly, “Sunny, you killed me and let them think I killed me. I don—”

“I cannot live like this and neither can the others.”

“What’s wrong about life?”

They are all vatkid filth, and they have ghosts in their mind and corrosion in their lungs, both incurable. True love is possible only in the next world—for new people. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you just leave?”

Because he will always be someone else’s dog. “I don’t know.”

“...I see.”

“You do?” An odd hope dares to flutter in his heart.

“You’re hurt. It feels like the life you have and deserve isn’t the one you should live, isn’t it?”

“I only felt alive then.”

“Oh, Sunny… I’ve been there, Sunny. And I’ve wanted to do worse than what you’re doing now.” She speaks in the same voice she used to train him and Aubrey on the walls, when the two of them would tumble terrifyingly towards the earth and she would drop down smoothly next to them, coaching their descent. “There’s help and support for people who feel the same way. I can arrange that. You’ll heal. You’ll feel like a new person—there’s hope for you yet. Don’t you forget it.”

He can’t imagine it, even though he knows it’s a future out there. But there is the thought…

“I’ve been a terrible sister. I never should have left you alone. I won’t leave you alone again.”

He missed the warmth of her care. A thickness gathers in his throat. “Turn off the vats,” he croaks. “If you care, turn them off.”

“Sunny, you’re bitter. I know you blame Sunbright. But we’ve been trying our b—”

“We?” The thickness evaporates. This is his sister—so be it. Sunny unsheathes his knife.

“Please.” She begins to cry, high-pitched inhales interrupting her sentences. “You already killed me once. This—this is cruel. We’re family. Sunny, don’t do this. Live. Have the life I built for you. You think it feels good to run the vats? I’m doing it for you. I want you to be on the right side of Sunbright for once. This is wrong. This is so wrong. I’ll do what you want. I’ll fix it. Please. What would Basil think? Wh—”

“We’ll never know.” He raises his arm.

From the corner where wall meets ceiling, a dark gleam of gunmetal catches Sunny’s eye. An automated rifle chirps and extends its barrel. Sunny curls, waiting to be shot—

There is silence.

“What? What did you do?” Mari whimpers. The gun stays inert, its red eye trained helplessly on Sunny. “I can’t—what? How did you do that?”

“That was a Vandalus DoS application,” Hero says, laughing shakily. “Overpowered, isn’t it? God. I can’t believe that worked.”

“Aubrey?” Sunny says.

“Yeah?”

“Please shut up. I am about to psychologically scar myself.”

“Twerp. Love you too.” And thankfully, not another word.

He inhales, jaw clenched, and saws through the tangle of piping emerging from her neck. Please please please, she sobs. The plumbing is tough and elastic so instead he jabs the point of his blade into the bundle again and again. Thick, rich-smelling fluids red and yellow spurt from the stump and splatter over his hands. Please—she goes quiet. Please.

Then he hops down by the cryonic orb, slipping a bit from the gore coating the sole of his boot. He wipes frost from its surface. Basil’s pale, placid head stares up at him, neck cut in the same way as Mari’s. Sunny lurches back, sick.

For a moment, he thinks of leaving it to be Mari’s successor. In another world, there is a Sunbright tower led by a boy who knows right from wrong. Would that not be hope? But what if there is no hope, and Sunny merely wants to hear his gentle voice again, to accept his guidance, to find a home for his own soul? After all, love is not hope, and there can be love without hope, love like theirs, a doomed love driving into a dark sea.

He uses the butt of his baton to crack the orb open, and then to crush his Basil’s skull, which does not ooze but fractures like quartz, tinkling. He pounds it into a thawing crumble red as watermelon slush. Sweat drips from his temple and gathers the hair around his face to sharp points. Vapor rises from the desecrated orb.

“It—It is done,” he tells Hero.

Hero is silent for a long time, leaving Sunny stewing in his own slowing panting. “Good job,” he says finally, the emotion scrubbed from his voice. “There’s a squad of armed men headed your way. You need to get out."

Sunny stands still. His fingertips tingle. A gurgle bubbles from Basil’s neck, which begins to soften in the lukewarm air and release its fluids.

“Sunny.”

He turns and walks towards the weakly glowing entrance of the atrium and feels that the light is strange and the doorway leads to a different world than the one he came from, one senseless and hostile.

“Yes, good,” Hero says. “One foot in front of the other. You’ve done this before.” The last syllable holding a barely-contained tremble. “Come home. Kel and Aubrey and I are waiting for you.”

And Sunny stops. He is thinking about the helmet dangling above the podium. He is thinking with cold hope, but the flash of his thoughts is miles away; all he knows of them is the shadows they cast from above. Now he is walking back toward the helmet.

“The fuck is he doing?” Aubrey hisses. “Tell him to turn around.”

“If you put that on, you’ll die,” Hero says. “There’s no guarantee you can take it off.”

Sunny lifts it and takes a better look. Peels off the films of skin and hair on the inside. “H, Aubrey, I want you to know something."

“You don’t have to do this.” Fever and fear crawl through Hero’s voice. “You’ll die here. Come up and live a life with us. Sunny.”

“You have to run,” begs Aubrey. She spits.

Sunny sinks to a cross-legged sit, pulling the helmet down towards him. “None of this is your fault. This is my own decision. Can you remember that?” He raises the helmet over his head and breathes air tinged with the scent of blood and sebum. “And—and. I—”

“...What?”

I love you. “It doesn’t matter. That’s all.” He shoves the helmet over his head just as a torrent of black-donned guards flood into the atrium.

An unbearable pressure tearing his skull apart, and then chilly clarity. Wind and womb.

He is on the Sunbright wall again, twitching and dangling above empty space. Gray-yellow skies like the liquid inside a skull. Far below him, a field of sunflowers pointing their faces haphazardly east, west, left, right, confusedly, no sun through the cloud layer to guide them.

He begins to glow, starting from his chest and spreading outwards, and then to burn, and then there is a great soft creaking shifting like a sigh as the sea of sunflowers below him turn to face him and unfurl their leaves. What is this feeling? A feeling of being loosened, of the glue that held him together being dissolved. But he is not free yet.

A single cord of sinew connects him to his body. His heartbeat pulses upwards through it. He twists up and slices.

The light in him explodes outwards.

He hurtles through the cloud, disintegrating as the air whips past him, dispersing into a billion prismatic photons humming with joy. Mass deletions wherever his light touches, manual overrides, server shutdowns, remote detonations of explosives on the other side of the globe. GET and PUT and POST requests pinging through the internet–but above all: DELETE. Sunbright spills its innards into the streets and collapses, steaming.

Below him, the vats grind to a stop. A sea of small bodies, blots of vibrating red on film, stop and look up. I love you, he thinks. He is numbers. He is light. He is possibility—he is and he isn’t. He is certainty—he will be.

Sunny gazes upon his friends. They are beautiful even through the grainy noise of camera footage. Kel in the elevator station peering down into the infinity shaft, a sweet, oblivious curiosity in his face. Hero miles above in front of a Vandalus terminal, head buried in his arms, shaking slightly. Aubrey behind him staring up at a stock ticker display, $SBR’s long red drop painting her face in dangerous pink like sunrise through sulfuric smog. Sunny says goodbye, terminating each camera connection with a machine’s kiss until all that is left to see with are his eyes.

His final command: Let me live, free and true. For a moment, for an eternity. The hum increases to a roar as cooling systems around the world overclock, calculating the causalities of Sunny’s last creation. Simulating the scent of summer, the chaotic dance of wind through young grass, the sonorances of his friends’ laughter, and a universe more. The bullet slows, its sonic boom stretching into a low buzz, and then into imperceptible background noise. It will not reach him in a thousand years, nor a million.

For he will be in a new world, in a new life. A small town far away brushed lovingly with golden sunlight and green oaks—no vats, no towers, no sliders, no companies—each little house hand-painted, the cracks in each sidewalk hand-sewn with dandelion seeds.

A basketball court for Kel, a candy store for Aubrey. A pizza parlor for Hero, a lake with a little jetty for Basil, a shaded cemetery for Mari. A forest behind his home with an ancient, sturdy tree for him. And the tree will hold a treehouse for all six of them. And the treehouse will hold his heart.

A droplet of water brushes down his cheek. He thinks it is a tear because it does not fizz or scald. But then comes another, plopping onto his collar and sliding down his shirt. Then another on his head, and several others around his shoulders, puddling in the divots of his skin, and all then around him comes down a torrent of cool, gentle rain and the fecund smell of wet soil and the grand sonic hollow of open sky for miles around, peppered by the chatter of seagulls high above and the tiny croaks of lawn frogs down below.

And then there is a rough, warm chuckle and an umbrella above Sunny’s head.

Sunny opens his eyes to heaven.